Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (37 page)

*   *   *

Whatever the truth of the matter, going from a New Year's Eve gig at Chequers nightclub in Sydney in 1973 to potentially disabling an Iranian nuclear power plant in 2012 is an extraordinary story arc. But that's how far the Youngs have come. There isn't a part of the world where their music isn't listened to, bought, covered, downloaded, pirated, converted into ringtones or turned into malicious computer bugs.

If a lone hacker or the US and Israel governments were indeed responsible for this act of cyber terrorism, they chose well: if you're going to fuck up the servers of a member of the “Axis of Evil,” do it with “Thunderstruck.” Out of all of
AC/DC
's contributions to testosterone rock, it's probably their most muscular song: a mesa of sound that completely belies the physical slightness of the men playing it. Their height—or lack of it—is one of the Youngs' enduring charms. Again, how do guys so small create a sound so big?

“The thumping B chord played by Malcolm provides the foundation for the riff's droning pedal tone and gives the song its modal quality,” says Joe Matera. “The chords are simple but are a force to be reckoned with. They reflect perfectly the song's title and subject matter.”

“I love the sparsity of it,” says Rob Riley. “The way it begins with Angus and then Malcolm arrives. It just makes the hairs on my neck stand up. Then Chris Slade comes in, the rest of the band. I get a full fat. It's fantastic. It just rocks like all fuck.”

It's also notable for being just about the last song Brian Johnson ever did where he sounds like he's supposed to and not like a strangled cat.

John Swan, the man who could have taken his job back in 1980, was ironically called in to do vocals on a cover of the song for a Holden vehicle commercial in Australia.

“I'm not kidding you,” he says, “my throat felt like I had been fucking gargling razor blades for about three weeks. It's really hard work. They take it to a place where it's going to be hard for anybody to emulate.”

*   *   *

Before late Bon Jovi and Aerosmith producer Bruce Fairbairn ultimately got his credit on
The Razors Edge
(again, no punctuation for
AC/DC
), a lot of the record had already been done at Windmill Lane Studios in Ireland, with George Young helming the sessions. (In fact, a two-inch multitrack tape of an early version of “Thunderstruck” was left behind and reported in March 2013 to be in danger of being destroyed after the studio was renovated.) Then George had had to stop working on the album because of family issues and the production shifted to Vancouver, Canada.

Derek Shulman, through his longstanding connection to Bon Jovi, introduced
AC/DC
to Fairbairn.

“I feel very proud of matching the band with Bruce and producing
The Razors Edge
,” he says. “To be honest it took a while for me to convince the Youngs that these guys were
AC/DC
type of people. However, I'm happy to say once they agreed to meet and talk and then record, it went unbelievably smoothly.”

Did he have a feeling it would do for the band what it did?

“As to knowing the album was going to ‘relaunch' their career, yes. I really did have a feeling that this was a special album for the guys and I couldn't have been happier to work with them to make that happen.”

The experience wasn't so special, though, for Brian Johnson.
The Razors Edge
was the first
AC/DC
album to carry the Young/Young credit for every song.

“As Rob said, they ‘rock like all fuck,'” says engineer Mike Fraser. “This is how
AC/DC
plays in the studio. Recording
AC/DC
, while it may be work, is not
hard
work. It's all about making them feel comfortable and being ready to capture them when they fire up. They tend to work very quickly in the studio, so as an engineer you need to be ready for anything at all times.”

It's a far cry from the labored, torturous sessions they endured under Mutt Lange. But the Youngs—still with George calling a lot of the shots—have navigated themselves to a point in their career where they, and not their record company, managers or producers, make all the decisions. They do few overdubs. They do a lot of single takes. No bullshit.

“The band doesn't really need a producer,” says Fraser. “But they like to have one there to make sure they're getting what needs to be gotten. Less is more. There are only two guitars, bass and drums in their recordings. None of the guitar parts are doubled and that leaves more room for the vocal without having to make the vocal super loud. They also play their instruments with a lot of dynamics instead of relying on a mix to create the dynamic. This is something that truly makes their sound so distinctive.

“They rarely do more than four takes. But with each take you feel that intensity building and building till finally when you get the right take it's just this onslaught of music. It's just incredible. They have that ability to draw this aggression and angst without being aggressive and angsty. It's like they're playing in front of 60,000 people but you've got three guys in the control room staring at you.”

That stadium effect is obvious on “Thunderstruck.”

“‘Thunderstruck' was one of those songs that just fell into place very easily. Angus's picking part makes that song build like no other. I remember being so pumped up while recording his parts that we were just about as sweaty as he was.

“It's magic. It's got this great sort of build. It's almost like it's holding back,
holding back
, the whole way, but you know it's going to pay off. It just gets you going right away, pumped up. It whips you into a frenzy. It doesn't pay off too early and the whole song is just this build. It's awesome.”

Certainly Angus's opening fingerpicking sortie—one and a half minutes of it before Malcolm arrives—annihilates the memorable intro to “For Those About to Rock” and has now become almost his signature song.

“To many guitarists, the intro to ‘Thunderstruck' is to Angus Young what ‘Eruption' was to Eddie Van Halen,” explains Matera. “Both sprang out of a playing exercise to morph into a signature and most representative piece for each player. The intro shows the simplicity in Angus's guitar work; yet, like yin and yang, it's underscored by a difficulty. What I mean by that is that during my years of teaching guitar, I've see many guitarists not play it correctly. Most assume it's played completely with the left hand, using hammer-ons and pull-offs—as he does in some live performances—yet in the studio Angus performed it with every note picked individually, using an extremely refined alternate picking technique. It again shows the strength and agility in Angus's playing and also reveals how some of the most loved classics and riffs are usually inherently simple.”

“Thunderstruck” is also the nearest thing to a Scottish Highlands nod in an
AC/DC
song since “It's a Long Way to the Top” or 1976 “Jailbreak” B-side, “Fling Thing.” It served as a timely reminder that this meat-and-potatoes rock band from Australia, which had been completely written off in some quarters as being tired, out of ideas and having had their day, was still capable of coming up with something strikingly brilliant, creative and original.

Qualities David Mallet accentuated in his clip for the song, one of those perfect marriages of sound and vision that encapsulate what is so powerful about rock when it is done right.

“They'd been away,” he says. “They'd been off the scene for some time. I thought to myself they have to come back with an absolute humdinger of something, and I didn't think it was right to come back with a comedy video like we had done [just four years] before [for ‘You Shook Me All Night Long']. I think they had to just come back and redefine what rock 'n' roll music was all about on film. I thought I would like to make the definitive heavy-music video.
AC/DC
is the ultimate stadium band. Apart from Queen and the Stones, they're probably the only band around who have 10 or 12 songs that are literally anthems.”

Terry Manning likens
AC/DC
's reliability to a Hollywood star of the 1930s and '40s: Gary Cooper.

“You look at Cooper,” he says. “He has that same look on his face all the time. He's always stoic. He's always quiet. He delivers his lines a certain way. But it always fits in the plot. It always
works
. In much the same way that Cooper could act with such restraint, yet deliver the movie, deliver the key scenes, deliver the really important lines when needed,
AC/DC
can stay right where they are comfortable, right in the groove that they love—and invented, by the way—and always come up with something powerful, new and relevant.

“That's a
huge
talent when you're able to do that. Think of it: they had been a band for many years, had ‘done it all' more than anyone else in the genre, when they came up with the intro guitar for ‘Thunderstruck.' How many bands could do that?”

*   *   *

Not many.

But not many bands could dispense with the drummer who played on their most popular song so soon after recording it and going on a world tour to promote it. (“Thunderstruck” was by far
AC/DC
's most popular single download when its back catalog was released on iTunes in November 2012.)

Yet that's what Angus and Malcolm did in 1993, informing Chris Slade—who'd joined them in 1989 after Simon Wright left to play for Dio/was sacked by Malcolm (take your pick)—that Phil Rudd wanted to come back, was going to have an audition and a decision would soon be made. Disgusted, Slade quit. Rudd rejoined the band in 1994.

The bone-domed Slade, whose unusual stage set-up (featuring two gong bass drums on either side of him) and energetic performances—both in the David Mallet video and live at Donington in 1991—were such an intrinsic part of the song's power, told French website Highway to AC/DC in 2011: “I didn't even touch a stick for three straight years.” He used the break from music to take up drawing and sculpting at art school.

The career of the man who played skins for Tom Jones, Manfred Mann's Earth Band and Gary Moore before joining
AC/DC
has never quite recovered. Slade ended up forming an
AC/DC
covers band, Chris Slade Steel Circle or CS/SC.

Mark Evans saw
AC/DC
with Slade at Donington and wasn't taken with him: “I'm probably the worst person to see
AC/DC
without Phil playing drums because it's so ingrained in my head. It was just like, ‘What is it?' I'd stop short of saying it sounded like a cover band, it never would, but it was
just
…” He trails off.

What about the gong bass drums?

“I was surprised when I even saw those. I wish I'd been at that meeting, you know,” he laughs. “‘Fuck 'em off, pal. Fuck 'em off. Where are the fuckin' drums? Fuck 'em off.'”

Even Mike Fraser agrees: “Chris Slade is a great guy and a great drummer but I think he tries to emulate that [Rudd sound] as opposed to just doing it. He was a great drummer for them, though. Great sound and a great look.”

So much greatness and it did him a fat lot of good. Morally, though, it may be the unlucky Slade who has the last laugh. For a band who thought they'd got back their best line-up with Rudd, in nearly a quarter century since releasing
The Razors Edge
AC/DC
hasn't written a song that comes anywhere near the inventiveness and power of “Thunderstruck.” Slade was a big part of it.

But the Youngs are making more money than ever and, as is their way, simply wouldn't give a fuck what anyone else thinks.

*   *   *

So what of
AC/DC
now?

Barely a week goes by when an announcement isn't made that they've released another commercial tie-in by licensing their logo to a new product or lending their songs to a new Hollywood movie or multiplayer game. It's abundantly clear that the ideas are drying up and it's time to cash in. Like The Rolling Stones,
AC/DC
in the 21st century is more brand than band.

Musically not a lot is happening—and hasn't for decades—yet
AC/DC
has always been, supposedly, about the music. Today that is not really the case. And it's not just because they don't have the same machismo or fire in the belly they had as young men. It's not an issue of age. It's not an issue of Malcolm's illness. The sound is still there, as good as it's ever been, but the songs are not.

“I believe when you are younger you tend to have more of a swagger and a chip on your shoulder looking for someone to knock it off,” says Fraser. “Over the years the boys have always tried to maintain their ‘sound' but have continued to develop it further and mature it. For instance, on
Stiff Upper Lip
they were going for a more ‘bluesy feel' than they had on past records.”

Though what use is a “bluesy feel” if the songs aren't a patch on what they used to be and the singer can't hit the right notes?

Today,
AC/DC
is largely about perpetuating a fiction. Other bands have good back catalogs. What keeps
AC/DC
more relevant, fashionable and cool than any other band that has been around for the past 40 years is the fact beautiful young women who men want to fuck and other women want to be—models, pop stars and actresses alike—go on getting photographed wearing their
AC/DC
T-shirts with Gerard Huerta's perfect logo on the front, and those beveled edges on the lettering still read out one fundamental word: rebellion. But it's a crock. The
AC/DC
of today stands mostly for money.

In spirit, too, something seems to be missing. As Clinton Walker wrote so perspicaciously in
Highway to Hell
: “The earthiness, humor and honesty [Scott] invested the band with, it today only echoes.”